This disclosure relates generally to displaying social content in search results.
Social networks permit users to post information about themselves and to communicate with other people or organization, e.g., their friends, co-workers or favorite groups. Some social networks permit users to specify friendships with other users.
Search engines provide information about resources (e.g., Web pages, images, text documents, and multimedia content) that are responsive to users' queries. A search result may include, for example, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and a snippet of information for a resource responsive to a query. Search results may be ranked according to scores assigned to the search results by a scoring function. The scoring function generates the scores for the search results according to various signals, for example, where and how often query terms appear in the search results and how common the query terms are in the search results.
Content from a social network may be displayed in search results provided by a search engine.